The hydrogen market has evolved but customers still rare as ‘unicorns’

afr.com:

Advances in shipping mean that liquid hydrogen will become the preferred form of the energy source, trumping hydrogen converted from ammonia, according to Jason Crusan, vice president of new energy solutions at Woodside.

It was long expected that customers would want to buy hydrogen as ammonia to transport the fuel because it is unstable in gas form, before re-conversion to hydrogen at its destination, Mr Crusan told The Australian Financial Review Energy & Climate Summit.

Woodside executive Jason Crusan at the Summit on Monday. Peter Rae

However, customers noticed that a lot of fuel efficiency was lost in that processes of conversion, he said. While the strongest “use case” for ammonia is as a direct replacement for burning coal, because the fuel efficiency is maintained, that uptake has been very slow, he added.

Instead, rather than converting the fuel to ammonia, it appears likely that liquid hydrogen, will be the “first mover” thanks to demand from customers, he said, explaining that Korea and Japan have built prototype vessels to transport the fuel.

“They should be able to build liquid hydrogen ships by 2030,” he said.

“It really comes down to what is the end use case they want to use it for,” he added. “If you’re going take the ammonia and burn it as ammonia, that’s great. If you take the ammonia and then crack it back into hydrogen… you also get a lot of inefficiencies.”

But customers who actually want to buy hydrogen are “unicorns”, says Peter Coleman, the former boss of Woodside Energy and current chairman of Infinite Green Energy, a privately held company that is developing green hydrogen projects in Western Australia in partnership with Samsung.

Mr Coleman, who is also the chairman of $6.8 billion lithium